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Understanding Print Sharing Services

Printers and
printing services are areas of Windows Server 2003 that
haven’t changed very much in the migration from
Windows 2000. Given that, let’s take a brief look at
the relevant terminology associated with printing services and how
Windows treats printing in general.

To Windows, a printer is the machinery that
actually puts ink or toner on a page. There also is such a thing as a
logical printer, which refers to the interface
between the physical printer and the software that is instructing the
printer to print. Think of the logical printer as the printer driver;
you can indeed use the two terms interchangeably.

Some important points to consider:

It is possible and practical in some instances to have multiple
logical printers for every physical printer. I cover some of the
scenarios in which such a configuration would be useful in this
section.

Conversely, you can associate one logical printer with multiple
physical printers, creating a “printer
cluster” of sorts. The technical term for this is a
printer pool, and it’s most
commonly used when print jobs need to be directed to the first
available printer. I also discuss that a bit later in this part of
the chapter.

Different types of drivers are available for use in Windows Server 2003. Level 2 drivers are older drivers that were written for Windows NT which run in kernel mode, a function of the OS that makes the entire OS vulnerable to any instability on the part of the driver. Fortunately, ...

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